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Who Is Trying To Destabilize The Balkans?

Are the Balkans to be be the new destabilized region? Are more Color Revolutions in the offing? Isn’t it enough that US/NATO has destabilized Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Ukraine? – Shorty Dawkins, Associate Editor

The US-NATO Empire is trying to shift the blame for the ensuing political & economic crises on the ultimate “fall country”- Russia.

Though seemingly spontaneous, it is likely that the US Secretary of State John Kerry knew that several sentences he said during the hearing of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs on February 24, 2015 could create a storm of media controversy across the Balkan region. Although he said many things concerning this year’s activities of the US foreign policy establishment during the nearly three-hour long session, these few sentences took the spotlight because they had to do with the Balkans and Russia.[1] In the Washington’s resurgent warmongering political discourse, Russia is once again, after two decades, being presented to the American people as the enemy number one (the “evil empire”).

In answering the question about the “growing Russian influence” in Europe posed by the Subcommittee’s Chairman Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who, it appears, cannot wait to get the US into another war, Kerry claimed that this indeed was the case, and he specifically mentioned “Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Macedonia, and others” [he also added Georgia, Moldova, and Pridnestrovie].[2] His answer was later echoed by the commentary of the junior Democratic Senator Christopher Murphy who stated that when he visited Serbia last Fall, he was amazed by the strength of the Russian presence there. Murphy seemed not to know anything about the long-running historical ties between these two countries and their peoples and claimed that the Russian presence is the result of the alleged “asymmetric warfare”, which he defined in this way: “They [Russians] buy the media, pay off public servants, or intimidate those they cannot buy”.[3]

I do not know what was going through Murphy’s mind while he was formulating this sentence, but I have no doubt that he let the cat out of the (CIA) bag and gave away the game. This is precisely what the civilian and military officials of the US-NATO Empire have been doing, overtly and covertly, in the region, since the break-up of Yugoslavia, which was also planned and executed by them and their cronies on the ground.

In recent times, these practices have been well documented. I for instance wrote an article for BFP on the journalistic “psychological operation” that goes under the name of the Southeastern European Times, the supposedly impartial online newspaper which is funded by the institution known for its “impartiality”, the US military’s European Command (EUCOM).[4]

On the other hand, (so far) there have not been any projects similar in intent and scope by either the Russian state institutions or their spinoffs in the Balkans. It is possible that Murphy may have been purposefully misinformed by his Balkan interlocutors, the “Euro-Atlantic” vassal political elites, which tend to exaggerate the “Russian threat” in order to get more funding from the US and, also, to get the US to be more tolerant of their own corrupt, even criminal, behavior toward the ordinary citizens whom they supposedly “represent”. However, it is also possible that Murphy is intentionally misrepresenting the facts on the ground because he has become a covert lobbyist for these elites and expects his efforts to be rewarded with certain favors in the future.

As to my own assessment of the present Russian influence, based both on my observations over the years as well as my direct experience in dealing with both the US and Russian diplomats, I will say that I have been surprised at how poorly Russians have played the PR game in the Balkans, especially taking into consideration that both the Soviet diplomacy as well as the Soviet intelligence networks had had, in certain operations, a great deal of success against their opponents.

Be that as it may, the most incendiary sentence of the Senate hearing had yet to come to pass, and it was articulated by Kerry precisely in response to Murphy’s Russo-phobic confabulations. Namely, Kerry quite ominously remarked that those Balkan countries he mentioned are “in the firing line” between the US-NATO Empire and Russia.[5] This sentence became the headline news in the US-NATO affiliated Balkan media and was exploited to spread the fears of political instability. The intent was to put further pressure on those Balkan governments and citizens who do not believe that their countries’ integration into the US-NATO Empire is a good idea.